Deep Purple, Burn

Deep Purple made some of the most significant music in early hard rock history.

Deep Purple remains underappreciated for its role in helping provide the foundation for metal as we know it.

Deep Purple's albums include several of the best 30-some minutes of blues-based rock put to vinyl.

But Deep Purple should never, NEVER have released this album cover.

Blitzkrieg-Ready for action

I like the band logo and uh.. well it's a shame they just didn't stop there and go with that. Instead it looks like they hired a middle school student who read too many X-men comic books and watched too many 1980's low budget post-apocalyptic movies. Unfortunately the artist didn't quite have the talent to carry out their vision. Either that or their lunch period ended before they could finish this masterpiece and the band had to go with it as is.

Ozzy Osbourne - Diary of a Madman

This is one of the first heavy metal albums I ever heard back in 1982 when my cousin sat me down in his room and spun this along with Iron Maiden's Killers and Dio's Holy Diver.

I know it was "Believer" which blew me out of the water when I first heard it since my cousin dropped the needle there first before trailing back to "Over the Mountain." I was immersed into the dark grooves and Randy Rhodes' mind-melding guitars, but this cover, along with Iron Eddie chopping down a victim of whom you only see their clutching hand off-panel, cemented my bond to metal music.

I'd already sprouted a love of horror films at this point and seeing Ozzy's Hyde-torn persona on this cover and the blood streaks on his pants really socked me out, not to mention his white-suited "angel" figure on the flipside of the album.

Audiences today might find Diary of a Madman's cover cheesy as all hell (there've been worse from Ozzy), but remember, we were the Atari generation and this album art was highly effective to our eyes. Playstation and iPods hadn't even been a thought and G.I. Joe didn't look like The X-Men, either.

New York Metal-84

Louie "Vee" Vetere was the lead singer for Teazer (who contributed a song to this compilation), produced this album and modeled for the cover with Grace "metal" Onzo. I have nothing wrong with any of the above and I understand it. What I don't understand is what in the world possesed him to wear nothing but a diaper on the cover?

Asia, Alpha

The first Asia album I bought has Asia's best cover--and one of Roger Dean's best pieces of album artwork.

The music was catchy, more so than most admirers of the band's prog origins wanted. The pop feel of Alpha went beyond even the radio-friendly sounds of the eponymous debut> Sure, it attracted plenty of new listeners (particularly females, lulled by John Wetton's smooth voice on ""Don't Cry" and "The Smile Has Left Your Eyes"), but rock fans who remembered the heights of Yes, ELP, and King Crimson could only hope for better days ahead.

The stunning cover brings to mind sci-fi novels of Earth-like worlds, a theme that utterly fails to play out in the banal lyrics about relationships.

Oh well, it's still nice to look at.